devirginating desire

a grey sky is like a page resting in
a solution of redundancy and restraint,

i have filed my complaints, nailed them
on the doors of my assailants, their bite
marks still fresh on my wood-picked skin,
their claws bright-white where they once
etched a mark of this impunity
that they call desire.

no one ever told me that i wielded an agency
over the brownness of my skin, or utility
of my innards, or roundness of my ass,
or the thought of my throat,
well riddled in the ecstasy of wants,

so i began to write my loss of agency without
knowing what it ever meant, so i reclused myself
to a departed space of pain when i never
knew that it is but to be salvaged.

my tiredness is my reprieve, in my restless
lies and stigmatized submission,

of a hundred torn-pieces of this tapestry.
the white falls slowly. the red fills
the myth of my own charity.

erased — i write when there is nothing
to be known, reversed to the birth
of a sky, with a broken scaffolding.

picture me when i have yielded to
this vile wantonness of freedom,
and the stubbornness of my disease.

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

For my upcoming prompt at dVerse Poetics (The Art of Confession in Poetry) later this evening, wherein I am invoking the likes of Lowell, Plath, Sexton, and Das to understand the nature of confessional poetry. Also linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at WTR.
Image source (Charles Francois Mouthon, Academic Study, 1892)

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